Neural mechanism underlying cognitive operations in emotional learning systems

在这一年中，该项目取得了重大进展。完成了大鼠行为实验中钙成像的全部数据收集。对记录的数据进行了二进制解码、统计计算、主成分分析轨迹等分析。研究发现，大脑边缘前区神经元对条件感觉刺激的反应显著，表现为推断性恐惧记忆和原始恐惧记忆。与没有推断恐惧记忆的大鼠相比，有恐惧推理的大鼠对推断恐惧记忆和原始恐惧记忆的条件感觉刺激均有更多的神经元反应。这些共同反应神经元可能在反感记忆和相关推断记忆的整合中起重要作用。同时，向杏仁核投射的前边缘神经元对条件刺激的反应更特异，表明恐惧记忆是推断性的，而不是原始的，这与先前的光遗传学研究结果一致。当推断记忆与厌恶之间的关系被分离时，对非条件刺激和感觉刺激的反应都减少了。这些结果说明了大鼠大脑认知系统操纵推断性情绪表达形成的机制。研究结果对开发治疗人类厌恶性障碍的新疗法具有一定的参考价值。

In this year, the project had significant progress. I finished all the data collection of calcium imaging during the behavioral experiments of rats. I also analyzed the recorded data by binary decoding, statistics calculation, PCA trajectory and so on. I found that neurons in prelimbic area significantly responded to conditioned sensory stimulus indicating inferred fear memory and original fear memory. Compared with rats without inferred fear memory, rats with fear inference had more neurons responding to both conditioned sensory stimulus indicating inferred fear memory and original fear memory. These co-responsive neurons may play important role in the integration of aversive memory and associated inferred memory. At the same time, prelimbic neurons projecting to amygdala showed more specific response to conditioned stimulus indicating inferred fear memory rather than original fear memory, which is consistent with previous optogenetics results. When the relationship between inferred memory and aversiveness being dissociated, there was reduction of neurons responding to both unconditioned stimulus and sensory stimulus. All these results illustrate the mechanism of cognitive system of rats brain manipulate the formation of inferred emotional expression. The results were valuable to develop new therapy for aversiveness disorder in human.